PHP7 and HHVM

Summary: Seravo.com offers a choice of alternative next-generation PHP engines, like PHP7 or HHVM to be used with WordPress

Alternative PHP Engines

By default, Seravo.com uses the PHP7 as its PHP driver because it is widely supported in the WordPress community and the vast majority of plugins will work with it. Alternative engines have however also been available and customers can easily change the version of PHP.

PHP versions

The PHP version can be modified by making a (or modifying an existing) file in /data/wordpress/nginx/*.conf that contains the line:

set $mode php7;

Currently available options are: php7, php7.2, php7.0, php5.6`. The version PHP7 refers to the most stable PHP version as estimated by Seravo admins, and should be the default for most sites.

If for some reason the old PHP version is preferred, just add a line to your nginx conguration in /data/wordpress/nginx/custom.conf

set $mode php5.6;

Remember to reload the Nginx configuration afterwards with wp-restart-nginx.

You can follow the same instructions both in our Vagrant box, and on the live servers. When you make the Nginx configuration part of your development repository, all your development, staging and production environments will use the same PHP back-end across the board.

HHVM

For a performance boost we used to offer the option of using the Facebook’s Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) instead of PHP as the WordPress driver. HHVM was a massive improvement over PHP5 in speed, but sometimes suffered from stability and compatibility issues. Now when PHP7 has been in general availability for over a year, HHVM is not offered for new WordPress instances any more as HHVM has been deprecated in favour of PHP7.

Developer documentation for Seravo.com – if you find flaws, please contribute a fix on GitHub!